Posts tagged ‘necco wafers’

Last week’s Sweets and Snacks Expo in Chicago showcased some fabulous candies from the past that are just right for today, like Goo Goo Clusters and Modjeskas (see my previous post). Here’s my take on some slightly more perplexing nostalgia candies coming down the candy pipeline.

Necco Wafers: A strange story from the folks at New England Confectionery. Necco Wafers are returning to their original artificial colors, having shifted to an all-natural palette a couple of years ago. The Necco representative explained that it was like New Coke and Classic Coke: Necco is going back to Classic Necco. This one surprised me. It seems totally contrary to the whole away-from-artificial movement. But the official line is that the customers demanded it. It is an isolated case, but you’ve got to wonder if there isn’t more of this counter-revolution brewing.

In the image above, the current packaging is at the bottom (note “all natural”), and the new package at the top (“an American classic”). The all-natural kind are still on store shelves, but will soon be replaced with the Classic. The package on the new (old) version doesn’t proclaim its artificialness, so this may be a switch with little fan-fare. If you are interested in comparing the flavors, buy an “all natural” roll now and hold on to it for a couple of months.

So nostalgia, it turns out, it a tricky thing. Those good old days involved a lot of chemicals.

Bosco Milk Chocolate: Speaking of nostalgia, here’s a new product that is un-ashamedly all about the packaging of nostalgia. Bosco you may recall from your childhood (or not, since if you are old enough to recall it, you probably can’t recall it….) Anyway, whoever owns the trademark now (who may or may not have anything to do with the original Bosco) has licensed it for use by Priam LLC. Priam is not actually a candy maker. Priam is a brand builder (at least I think that’s what this means: “a one stop resource solution…lending its expertise to its brand partners in the critical disciplines of sales, marketing, logistics, merchandising, graphic design, accounting and finance, and public relations.”). Priam has arranged for the wrapping of the Bosco name and logo around a bar of milk chocolate which does not, so far as I can gather, actually contain any Bosco. But this bar was a huge draw at the New Products Preview event, and everybody wanted to take a picture and take one home. We probably won’t even open it; the “value” of this candy is entirely in the wrapper.

Fizzies: These are flavored and sweetened tablets that work on the Alka-Seltzer principle to produce a glass of … beverage, I guess. I don’t have much to say about these, except that I remember them from when I was a kid and now they are back. They went off the market in the late 1960s when cyclamate, an artificial sweetener essential to the Fizzies formula, was banned. Bummer.The new version is sweetened with sucralose, another non-nutritive sweetener. We thought they were fun when I was 6, so perhaps a whole new generation of 6 year olds is waiting for this sensation.

Of course, when I was 6 we didn’t have Pop Rocks and Toxic Waste Candy and other such violent taste experiences, so Fizzies was about as exciting as it got. Will the youth of today prove too jaded for old fashioned fizz? In the Candy Professor test kitchen, the answer seems to be “yes.” My kiddie test subject yawned and walked away when the tablet fell into the water and then, well it didn’t so much fizz as fizzle. When she came back a few minutes later, it was still fizzling. Either they got the formula wrong, or we were just way more easily amused forty years ago. Against just such a possibility, the Fizzies people have come up with several cocktail recipes to keep the over-21 crowed fizzing along.

(C) Samira Kawash

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